To allow a brief glimpse behind the curtain, dear reader, I will admit to you that I am an ardent thanatophobe. My fear of death comes at once, sudden and intense, forcing me out of whatever book, or song, or performance I am experiencing and into a visceral spiral of intense anxiety and panic. Queer people have always been concerned with death and the unhappy present. Whether the sad, melancholic queers of nineteenth-century literature; the victims of the AIDS crisis and the corresponding militant organizing surrounding it; or the suicidal teenagers brought up in a world that they realize has not and — for the near future — will not accept them, queer people across generations have always been entangled with the morbid. The present moment only exacerbates this truth. Renée Nicole Good’s murder as a lesbian woman married to a butch serves as yet another instance of queer expendability and death in the national imagination. Queer theory remains ambivalent about how queer people should understand time and death. Where scholar Lee Edelman argues that the future is “kid stuff,” José Esteban Muñoz argues that futurity and hope are inherent to queerness. Perhaps the language just hasn’t been right yet.
Initially, this week, I wanted to discuss Adrianne Lenker’s song “Ingyadar.” Its refrain — “Everything eats and is eaten / Time is fed” — along with the beautiful description of the death and decomposition of her great aunt’s beloved horse serve as a wonderful backdrop to handle the grief and hurt that people have been feeling in recent days. Such a piece might, I had imagined, offer some description of the ephemeral beauty which interpenetrates the now quotidian horror. Unfortunately, in attempting to fully develop those thoughts, my words fell flat. The sentiments were there and right, but the language felt wrong — not only wrong, but irresponsible. While the hurt is real and needs to be politically motivating, a redoubling of focus upon queer death seems like a misplaced effort. The language certainly isn’t right yet.
Instead, for the current moment, it may be best to turn our attention to another of Adrianne Lenker’s songs, which deals with just this issue: “Anything.” Lenker’s most popular song, “Anything” is a beautiful ode to a love that extends beyond words and narrative, all the way to the essentials of love and care. The song develops the beautiful, sensory, intimate world that the central couple inhabits through evocative imagery and loving anecdotes. The song, written from reminiscences about a past lover, develops a language for understanding an existence, which mustn’t be hampered by being told, by adhering to a strict, intelligible narrative, but which rather exists at the edges of bright, ephemeral moments.
Perhaps the most beautiful aspect of the piece is how Lenker eschews narrative in favor of these beautiful, shining moments of intimacy between two lovers. The love that Lenker’s narrator feels for their beloved goes beyond language and its monotonous genres and stereotypes. They cannot communicate their love for their partner through conversations about family, pain, or fear, but they can communicate it in a pre-linguistic sense. Rather than words, Lenker wants to share space and time with her partner — she wants to listen to “the sound of you blinking” and “your hands soothe,” “your heart beating,” and “the way you move.” The language of love isn’t articulable; its syntax can’t be written or scrutinized. Love exists in gesture; it exists in the presence and the absence, it is interpersonal, and it is just as necessary for Lenker’s lover to produce loving gestures as for Lenker to lovingly receive them.
But words aren’t enough. In “Anything,” when the couple is brought out of an embodied, interpersonal love and made to congeal their feelings into language is also when conflict and division arise. The only times when conversation is invoked in the song are times of disconnect in the relationship. The lines “Don’t wanna fight but your mother insists” and “Grocery store list, now you’re getting pissed / Unchecked calls and messages” invoke conversation not as a reparative force but as a force of division where the two lovers cannot unite in agreement. Even at the end of the song, when Lenker seeks to communicate their love for their partner, it cannot exist in words: “You held me the whole way through / But I couldn’t say the words like you / I was scared, Indigo, but I wanted to.” Indicating that sentiment and love can be truly felt, even if the words used to express that love may only ever work to pollute or misconstrue it.
More than simply loving words and gestures, however, Lenker’s song creates an intimacy that is both depersonalizing and universalizing. While Lenker does embrace these moments of embodied intimacy between two present partners, she also implores them to remember a more disembodied or spiritual sense of intimacy. Through the lines, “Weren’t we the stars in heaven? / Weren’t we the salt in the sea? / Dragon in a new warm mountain / Didn’t you believe in me?” Lenker invites her partner to remember a time beyond their humanity, each partner’s current forms and histories, and to return to a disembodied material past — when all beings were simply gas, and our concrete matter was unstructured nutrients on our infant planet — and to use that ambiguity as a place for embrace and contact. It is a return to the most basic impulses, to the basic beauty and wonder that is life on this incoherent and ever-changing planet. Lenker’s abstraction of their love to this extraordinary scale — which only ever comes forth in kissing, witnessing, presence, and accompaniment — makes it feel grand and nebulous without being historically delimited.
Perhaps in a moment of such intense confusion and fear, an invitation to embrace indefiniteness rings hollow, but I maintain that queerness’s most powerful addition to our culture is to abandon the need to strictly define and delimit narratives and invite multiplicity. A strident politics of grievance and death can be politically motivating, but in cutting out lived experiences, which exist in unclarity and in inarticulable truths, it assails as much as it reveals. The present moment is difficult, at times feeling insurmountable and killing, but in reembracing life’s inarticulability, the fleeting images and bright shining moments which evade linguistic capture, it may unshackle us from narratives that have only ever told of our coming deaths and annihilation. The language hasn’t been right, isn’t right, and until it is, I don’t wanna talk about anything.
